Thursday, November 1, 2012

Working Out My Poses

Having put together a rough prototype of the movement in the game, I'm starting to think about some of animations I'm going to need. I have some quick placeholder sketches where I need the jumping and falling, but haven't completely figured out the rest. Most of the trouble is revolving around transitioning from different cape animations. At the moment, the character goes from standing still with the cape draped from his back to sticking straight out when he's running. I need a few transitional frames between to make it look like the cape is catching the wind.

A few other's to give some thought to:

How far up to have the cape go when falling from jump or dropping out of the sky.

How to compensate for that transition when going from a fall to landing.

How to handle the cape when changing direction.

These extra details are what I'm hoping will set my game apart, but is probably where the more tedious work is going to come from. I'm starting to think about ways to cut back on the work and maybe include little cheats. Kind of like figuring out situations where I can reuse assets or take advantage the sprite size.

I'm hoping the power will be back on by this weekend so I can work on this and implement a timing feature to work in my "float up" idea. The whole thing was developed and explained to me by fellow indie developer, Bodzio Stawski. Do yourself a favor and swing by his development blog to see the great stuff he is building in Construct 2: Selection B